Air View and Smart Screen, S Voice and Google Now

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 comes with a number of advanced features shared with the Galaxy S4. Some features are left exclusive to the flagship, but the Mega 6.3 still gets a good set.

The first one is Air View, which debuted on the Galaxy Note II and worked with the S Pen. There's no S Pen on the Galaxy Mega 6.3, or a need for it - the phone can detect your finger hovering over the screen.

This enables information preview (e.g. texts, calendar entries and so on), previewing videos just by pointing to a spot in the timeline, the next track in the music player by hovering over the next button (works with the previous button too), previewing folders, speed dial contacts, and magnifying links in web pages. Air view detects fingers 1cm / 0.5" away from the screen, so there's no danger of accidentally tapping the screen when you meant to use Air View instead.

Air View turns your finger into an S Pen

The familiar Smart Stay feature is enabled too. It prevents the screen from locking as long as the front-facing camera can see your face (great for reading).

Smart Rotate, Smart Scroll and Smart Pause are not included although the Mega has the required hardware for it (a front-facing camera), unlike the Air Gestures, which need a special new sensor on the front.

There are a number of motion gestures too, which are not exactly new. There's direct call (dial the contact whose info you're currently viewing by lifting the phone up to your ear), smart alert (makes the phone vibrate when you pick it up if there are missed events), zooming and panning in the gallery, a shake of the phone to refresh the list of Bluetooth devices and muting alarms or pausing music playback by putting the phone face down.

The gestures from S III and Note II are on board too

You can also pause the music player by putting your palm on the screen. A palm swipe takes a screenshot.

S Voice and Google Now

S Voice is Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri and Google's own Voice Actions - it can be used to initiate or answer a call, dictate text, play music, open an app, change a setting, make a memo (including voice memo), add a reminder, schedule an event, set or snooze an alarm or timer, check the weather, do a search on the internet, take a photo, look for local listings (e.g. nearby restaurants) and even get an answer to a question.

S Voice

The problem is S Voice is not nearly as fast or as accurate at recognizing your speech input as Now.

Naturally, being a Jelly Bean smartphone, the Galaxy Mega 6.3 also comes with Google Now.

It provides traffic information to your work or home, knows those scores of sports teams you follow, has the weather forecast for your location and can even tell you who Kevin Spacey is.

Google Now

Google Now also has its own separate widget on the homescreen.

Synthetic benchmarks

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 is powered by a Snapdragon 400 chipset, which packs two Krait 200 cores clocked at 1.7GHz, 1.5GB of RAM and Adreno 305 GPU. It doesn't sound as impressive as the Galaxy S4 flagship, but it should be good enough for a midrange phone.

Single-threaded performance is great, close to the Snapdragon 600 high-enders and ahead of older chipsets. As for multi-threaded performance, the Galaxy Mega 6.3 is between 25% and 50% slower than the quad-core flagships. It has an advantage over last year's Cortex-A9 based quad-cores though.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)132

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)132

LG Optimus G Pro147

HTC One151

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3169

Sony Xperia Z264

HTC Butterfly266

Oppo Find 5267

HTC One X+280

LG Optimus G285

Samsung Galaxy Note II305

HTC One X (Tegra 3)330

LG Optimus 4X HD350

Samsung Galaxy S III359

Meizu MX 4-core362

Nexus 4431

Linpack

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)791

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)788

LG Optimus G Pro743

HTC One646

Sony Xperia Z630

HTC Butterfly624

LG Optimus G608

Oppo Find 5593

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3400

Samsung Galaxy Note II214.3

Nexus 4213.5

Meizu MX 4-core189.1

HTC One X+177.7

Samsung Galaxy S III175.5

HTC One X160.9

LG Optimus 4X HD141.5

Geekbench 2

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)3324

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)3227

LG Optimus G Pro3040

HTC One2708

Sony Xperia Z2173

HTC Butterfly2143

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.31894

Samsung Galaxy S III1845

LG Optimus G1723

LG Optimus 4X HD1661

iPhone 51601

Both full system benchmarks, AnTuTu and Quadrant, find the Galaxy Mega 6.3 competitive against quad-core A9s and not too far behind newer Krait-based quad-cores.

AnTuTu

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)26275

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)24716

HTC One22678

Sony Xperia Z20794

LG Optimus G Pro20056

HTC Butterfly19513

Samsung Galaxy S III15547

Oppo Find 515167

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.313621

Quadrant

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)12446

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)12376

LG Optimus G Pro12105

HTC One11746

Sony Xperia Z8075

HTC One X+7632

LG Optimus G7439

Oppo Find 57111

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.37059

HTC One X5952

Samsung Galaxy Note II5916

Samsung Galaxy S III5450

Meizu MX 4-core5170

Nexus 44567

When it comes to 3D performance, the Adreno 305 is not the fastest, but it only needs to power a 720p screen. If we take the screen resolution out of the equation, GFXBench 2.5 Egypt posts results that are on par with the Mali-400 in the Galaxy Note II, while the newer GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex gives the Adreno 305 in the Mega 6.3 a slight advantage.

Note that both benchmarks were run in 1080p offscreen mode (that's over twice as many pixels as the Mega's actual screen).

GLBenchmark 2.5 Egypt (1080p off-screen)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)43

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)41

HTC One37

Oppo Find 532

Google Nexus 432

Sony Xperia Z31

Sony Xperia ZL31

Sony Xperia SP31

Apple iPhone 530

LG Optimus G Pro30

LG Optimus G21

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.317

Samsung Galaxy Note II17

HTC One X11

GLBenchmark 2.7 T-Rex (1080p off-screen)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)17.1

Apple iPad 416.8

Google Nexus 1013.9

LG Optimus G13.9

Sony Xperia Z13.5

Sony Xperia Tablet Z13

Sony Xperia ZL12.8

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)17.1

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.36.3

Samsung Galaxy Note II4.9

Epic Citadel shows what the Mega 6.3 gaming will be like at its own screen resolution and with current game graphics (the T-Rex bench pushes harder than any current game). The result is almost the same as that of Adreno 320 packing phones with 1080p screens, which shows the 305 is a good match for a 720p screen.

Epic Citadel

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)59.8

Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)57.1

HTC One56.4

Sony Xperia Z55.6

Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.355.5

LG Optimus G Pro54.2

Nexus 453.9

Asus Padfone 253.4

LG Optimus G52.6

Samsung Galaxy S III41.3

Oppo Find 538.6

JavaScript performance mostly depends on single-core performance and the Galaxy Mega 6.3 does very well here. Surprisingly, it held its own against the Android flagships when general HTML5 performance was tested with BrowserMark 2 and Vellamo (again, the lower screen res helps here).